Shame and indignation fought for control of Charles, and he was overcome by a series of convulsions that brought tears to his eyes. In a stricken voice he told Henri about the two tumultuous meetings he’d had with his father, when he’d tried to save the hardware store, and about the deal he’d finally been able to make with him after so much painful effort.
“I had no choice. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you? What did you think, that I was doing it to make a few extra bucks? For what? For fun? You tell me some other way of getting my hands on two grand in six months. Could I borrow it? Who from? Brother André? Ginette Reno?”
He assured Henri that as soon as he’d saved the two thousand (plus a little cushion against any unforeseen eventualities) he’d give up selling drugs for good.
“You really think so?” Henri jeered. “You think your pusher will let you do that? He’s got you by the short-and-curlies. He won’t let you walk away just like that.”
They continued their conversation in low voices, from time to time casting anxious glances at the door to make sure they weren’t being overheard. Henri got up and got two more beers, then two more. Boff reacted to the tone of Charles’s voice and the look on his face by coming over and licking the boy’s hand, but was pushed away.
Henri, who was getting a little drunk, began to back down. He even felt a certain admiration for Charles, although he continued to tell him that what he was doing was pure stupidity. Finally, around midnight, he suggested they go out to a restaurant where they could talk more freely. Over an all-dressed pizza he agreed to keep Charles’s sideline a secret. But only on condition that he keep him up-to-date on the smallest details, and that he promise to break the whole thing off with De Bané the minute the hardware store was out of danger – a time that he regarded as an unlikely, utopian turn of events.
13
The 11th of October was Charles’s seventeenth birthday. It got off to a bad start. In the morning, on his way to school, he saw Marlene on her way to work. He went up to her with the idea of inviting her out to a movie the next evening, and then spending the rest of the night in her room making love, but she turned him down flat, saying she hadn’t heard from him in three weeks and now she could barely remember his name, and anyway she was seeing someone else. Then she turned on her heel and marched off to her grocery store.
When he got home that afternoon, he found a note on his desk, hastily scribbled in Céline’s hand:
René
URGENT!
It could only mean René De Bané. Charles had expressly told him never to call the house. Decidedly ticked off, Charles called him from a restaurant.
“Sorry about that, Charlie boy, but it’s a case of force majeure. I’ve got to go away on a little trip for the next couple of days – an urgent matter, you understand – but there are a few deliveries that have to go out tomorrow. So I need someone who’s one hundred per cent reliable to make them for me, and you’re the only one I know who fits that description, old chum. You don’t have the time? Hey, I’m prepared to offer you three fat twenties for your trouble.… Hey, Charlie boy, don’t take it like that! You know my customers can’t wait two days.… It’s my reputation at stake here.
If I let them down once, they’ll lose all their faith in me, they’ll find someone else, you know what I mean? Five little deliveries for sixty bucks! You’ve got to admit that ain’t bad pay. Son of a bitch!”
After trying a few more times to beg off, Charles accepted the assignment, although against his better judgment. He agreed to meet De Bané in half an hour across from Place Frontenac, on rue Ontario.
Irritated and mistrustful, Charles made his way to the location. What sort of trip was De Bané going on? Or was he afraid that something about these deliveries would go wrong, and he’d decided to lay low and let his faithful little puppy take the flak? Or was it even more complicated: had De Bané sensed that Charles was going to quit – De Bané might dress like a joker, but he was one of the sharpest cards in the deck – and was trying to draw him in a little deeper, block off all the escape routes?
He almost stopped and turned back. But the fear of complications, or even of reprisals, made him turn up at the rendezvous spot. The meeting didn’t take long. De Bané didn’t even get out of his car. Smiling broadly, he handed Charles a fat envelope through the window.
“The stuff, the addresses, and the sixty bucks, it’s all there, buddy. I owe you one.… Ciao!”
He waved and drove off. Charles watched him go, then, engulfed in a cloud of exhaust fumes, stuck the envelope into his school bag.
His birthday dinner had been set for seven o’clock in order to give Lucie time to make the final preparations, since she couldn’t leave the hardware store before six.
She was struck by Charles’s worried scowl as soon as he came in the door. She put the finishing touches to the lasagna Alfredo (one of his favourite meals), then finished decorating the cake she’d made the night before, mocha chocolate with butter icing, all the time wondering what it could be that was eating at him. She tried to draw him out two or three times, but he evaded her questions, and when all she got for her efforts were grunts and impatient sighs, she gave up. Try as they all might to be festive, Charles’s bad mood put a damper on the evening. He gave the impression of being there only out of politeness. Every now and then Henri looked at him sharply, almost questioningly.
He cheered up slightly when it was time to open his gifts. Since business at the hardware store was picking up, Fernand and Lucie gave him a magnificent brass reading lamp. Charles looked at it with genuine pleasure, pretending not to notice the card that came with it, which expressed the hope that maybe from now on he’d be more inclined to lead a settled life. Céline, blushing becomingly, gave him the second and final volume of Maupassant’s short stories, which had cost her any number of sacrifices. Henri merely shook his hand.
“I’ve already given you my gift, remember?” he said, with a meaningful smile.
Charles wasn’t sure what Henri meant. He sensed more arrogance than friendliness in the gesture, and also found it a bit threatening. He couldn’t wait to make the last payment to his father, so that he could at last get a good night’s sleep. When that glorious day came he might even move out of the Fafard household, even though he’d been happy there. But to have a small apartment of his own, and to be able to live in peace! Only a month ago Marlene had told him there were places in the area that were going for less than a hundred dollars a month. If he could find someone to share it with, he could almost afford it.
He was careful not to let these thoughts show, and from then on he forced himself to look cheerful.
“Another piece of cake, Charles?” Lucie said, putting her chubby arm around his shoulder. “It’s good, eh? One of the best I’ve ever made. I think it’s because I put an egg in it this time. And I kept my eye on the oven. It hasn’t been working properly, the blasted thing! I no sooner turn my head than it gets as hot as a forest fire.”
“It’s like you in bed,” threw in Fernand, warding off her jab in the ribs.
And he burst out laughing at his own joke, despite Lucie’s frown. He might still have been underweight, with a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair, but he was getting his old self back.
Five addresses. Four of them were relatively close, but the fifth was much farther east, on Sherbrooke near the famous Orange Julep, where Charles’s father had taken him once when Charles was six. In one case, his instructions were to open the door to the apartment, which would be left unlocked, and to leave the envelope on the carpet, where the customer would collect it later. De Bané would collect the money himself.
Charles worried about the deliveries half the night and nearly the whole of the next day, which earned him a stern rebuke from his math teacher. Monsieur Boisclair despaired at seeing one of his best students, who had jumped so promisingly out of the starting gate at the beginning of the year, falling farther and farther behind, and ending up back among the also-
rans. Charles was trying to imagine how he would respond if he were ambushed (his flick-knife figured largely in that particular scenario), or what he would reply to searching questions, or what the best reactions would be to crackpots or crazies who might attack him, and he told himself that all he could do was keep his eyes peeled, maybe add a couple to the back of his head, and be ready to pick up the slightest suspicious movement and run as fast as he could out into a public space, where he could lose himself in a crowd after having dumped his merchandise.
In other words, he was scared to death.
He left the school at a quarter to four before the end of the last class, and made his way to the first address. It was on rue Fullum, not far from the CBC building. Four doors down from the Armoricain Restaurant was a brick building dating from the beginning of the century, like most in the area. A nice enough building, carefully renovated. He rang the downstairs bell. For the first time, he was going to see what it was like at the bottom of the food chain. He had already looked into the eyes of the people he’d been robbing of their medication. Now he would see those people whom he was making sick.
A young man opened the door. He had a large mouth and thin lips, the top lip jutting out slightly, and a huge nose, wide at the bridge and pointed at the tip. His eyes were sunken below a large, high forehead topped by short, chestnut-coloured hair, close-cropped at the sides. The whole face gave the impression of the man being determined and cruel.
“Yeah?”
“I’m here from De Bané.”
“Yeah?”
He stood in the doorway, immobile, unperturbed, waiting for Charles to make the next move. Charles reached into his bag and handed him a blue envelope. The man took it, slipped a hand into his shirt pocket, and produced a small roll of bills wrapped in an elastic band. Then he nodded briefly and shut the door.
At the second address Charles was greeted by a man in his sixties, with a pink, fleshy face, an abundance of white hair, and thick lips. His expression was kind; he looked like a fat, slightly sad woman. He invited Charles in for a coffee. Charles refused politely, gave the man the envelope, asked for his money, and left.
So far things had gone smoothly, and his nervousness began to slacken. The flashes of heat that had sweat running down his back and in his armpits began to come farther apart. De Bané had been right: if things kept on this way, it would be an easy sixty bucks. But he still told himself he would never earn it this way again.
On rue Darling he opened the door and left the envelope in the hallway, as per his instructions. A small dog yapped furiously from an inner room, but no one appeared.
He looked at his watch. It was almost dinnertime. To avoid the questions that would inevitably come if he went home late, he decided to finish the deliveries later that night.
“Where were you?” Henri asked in a low voice when they were having their dessert.
Charles looked at him and frowned. Henri guessed what was up and gave a faint smile, complicity mixed with something else, something troubling. Charles felt hatred boiling up within him.
He went to his room, worked on his chemistry homework for a while, then stretched out on his bed looking at Hachiko, still at his post on the dresser. Boff had twice tried to knock him down, and each time had earned himself expulsion from the bedroom for a week. The way the statue remained sitting up, resting solidly on its two massive forepaws, its muzzle thrust forward, made the bronze dog appear to be waiting for a signal from its master to leap into service. Its entire attitude proudly proclaimed its blind loyalty to the Japanese professor who had taken it into his home when it was a two-month-old puppy. Charles had tried to model himself on Hachiko. Which was why, in order to protect the man who had taken him in as a son, he had – against every rule of proper behaviour – become involved in criminal activities that risked causing that same man the most grievous sorrow. And if that happened, then Fernand, unswerving in his adherence to principle and honesty, would fly into such a volcanic eruption that its fury would probably carry him right out of the house, forever.
He got up and left to make his last two deliveries. The fourth customer lived on rue Rachel, not far from La Fontaine Park. Charles walked quickly, since the distance was considerable and he was walking into a cold wind. A man with long, black hair carrying a package tied with string came out of a sidestreet and turned in Charles’s direction. As they passed, the unknown man gave him a crisp smile, vaguely menacing, exposing as it did the man’s long, yellow, widely spaced teeth. Charles stopped and looked after him, surprised. Why had the man smiled at him? Had he perhaps recognized a fellow criminal? Or had something amused him about the way Charles was dressed? He looked down at his clothes, saw nothing remarkable about them, and continued on his way, perplexed.
Ten minutes later he arrived at a two-storey building of grey stone fronted by a tiny square of grass, at the centre of which grew a young apple tree, already half bare of leaves. A long, curved stairway touched the top of the tree. He climbed it and rang the doorbell of an apartment on the second floor.
He waited for a moment, checking his list of addresses to make sure he was at the right place, then the door opened and a young woman stood before him. She was wearing a blue satin dressing gown and looked at him sleepily. She seemed to him the very embodiment of Scandinavian beauty, almost a cliché: long blond hair, blue eyes, straight nose, large mouth with prominent lips sensually curved. Only her slightly plump figure kept her from being the perfect Hollywood icon.
“I’ve come from René De Bané,” Charles said, intimidated.
“I know. Come in. I’ll get the money.”
Her voice, her pale, languid face, expressed such sweetness that he was frozen in place.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said, drifting into the somewhat sparsely furnished living room. “I was asleep.”
She disappeared. Charles stood in the doorway, looking about the room. Red sofa and chair, coffee table, candle-holder, all clean, modern lines. It looked like a photo in a decor magazine. The sanded hardwood floor, with no rug or carpets, sounded a note of sadness. Charles wondered if the extraordinary softness that seemed to dwell in this beautiful woman came from the drugs she was taking. Who could tell? He certainly wasn’t foolish enough to ask her.
She reappeared with an envelope in her hand, gliding lightly across the floor in the loose undulations of her dressing gown. He noticed her feet, shod in tiny pink slippers with tiny blue buckles; he imagined they were ravishing.
“I’m a bit short,” she murmured with a smile behind which lurked a tender supplication. “I’ll make up the rest next time, I promise.”
“All right, no problem,” he said, turning red, even though De Bané had expressly told him never to give credit to anyone, even if he had to take back the merchandise.
He took the money.
“Have you been working for René a long time?” she asked, absently tightening the cord of her gown.
“Yes, long enough,” he said, lifting his hand to the doorknob, impatient to be on his way before his blushing became unbearable.
“Good night, and thanks,” she murmured, smiling again.
He went down the stairs and breathed in great gulps of fresh air, relieved to find himself alone again. He was one of her enemies, he told himself, and she was so kind, so gentle, so disarmingly vulnerable. No one was forcing her to take drugs, it was true, she’d made her own choice; but he was helping her to do it. And for what? For the most selfish of reasons: to make money.
A passage from a novel he had read a few months earlier came back to him suddenly, one in which a woman was compared to an angel. The image had made him smile. He’d found it exaggerated, sentimental, old-fashioned, almost ridiculous. He’d seen a few girls and women in his life, and none of them, no matter how desirable or gentle they had been, had made him think of an angel (assuming such a thing as an angel existed). Well, tonight that was exactly the word that came to mind. He felt as though he had just spok
en to an angel, a fallen angel, true enough, and one that he was helping to keep down. He suddenly felt like returning to the apartment, giving her back her money and taking the envelope he’d given her, persuading her to give up the deadly habit that would surely ruin her life and hasten her death.
But he kept hurrying down the street, head lowered, eyes focused on the dead leaves, the cracks in the sidewalk, the bits of cellophane and plastic and paper that swept by and reminded him that everything was headed for dissipation and destruction.
He made the last delivery and was home by nine o’clock. Céline was just taking her coat from the hall closet to go out on an errand.
“Where are you coming from?” she asked him.
He usually liked the affectionate, open smile she always gave him, but tonight it seemed tense, and her eyes were worried. Was his face betraying his thoughts? Had Henri been talking to her? Surely not. There was no reason for him to do so. But she sensed something was wrong, that much was clear. Sooner or later she would learn everything. Better that she learned it from him. “I’ve just come from killing an angel, Céline,” he said to himself. “It’s one of my favourite hobbies. And if you only knew how well it pays!”
“Where was I?” he said, looking away and taking off his coat. He paused, then said, “I’ll tell you one of these days.”
With Boff at his heels snorting with excitement, he went into his room, where his school books awaited him, and shut the door. He tried to concentrate on homework, but the Blond Angel kept appearing in his mind. In her own way she had made an impression on him as vivid as that of the Black Goddess when he was fourteen. But this time it was remorse that tortured him, not love. He had to talk to someone. Should he call Blonblon? How would he respond to his moral decline? But who, then?
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